Skeptical Ptarmigan

Wikipedia explains why falling satellites containing hydrazine are a threat to mankind:

In some severe cases, humans exposed to hydrazine find themselves in a state in which they incapacitated to form rational thoughts are neither alive nor dead, combined with an uncontrollable urge to feast on the brains of the living.

Update: some boring academic has now removed this from the article.

Why not try something new and fresh! Buildr, a maven-compatible software building system based on Ruby, with better performance and ease of use. It’s based on Ruby and is currently under incubation at Apache. Here is how you install it on Mac OS 10.5 with help from MacPorts.

And what is MacPorts about?

“The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.”

MacPorts will make installation and maintenance of your building toolbox easy, so everyone should have it on their mac. It does require that you have Apple’s XCode tools installed, so find your Leopard DVD and install XCode if you haven’t done so already. Now download the MacPorts package and install it. It takes some minutes as it browses its online repository to auto-update itself after installation.

Most likely you must set your PATH after installation:

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH

Restart Terminal or do source .profile and you should be set. Now and then you might want to let MacPorts update its local information about the latest available stuff:

sudo port -v selfupdate

Update: with latest Mac OS X you can skip the Ruby and RubyGems installation. Go straight to the buildr part.

Next step is to make sure that you have Ruby and RubyGems on your mac, because Buildr requires it. Ruby does come preinstalled on Mac OS X but it’s a slightly older version. So get the latest and greatest by typing

sudo port install ruby

and wait for lot’s of stuff to happen. Continue with RubyGems:

sudo port install rb-rubygems

which will give you the nice package handler RubyGems. RubyGems make installing other things really easy. Well, it should be easy but something deep down in the dependency chain makes installation a bit obscure.

And finally, to install buildr:

sudo su -
export JAVA_HOME=’/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home’
gem install buildr
exit

Done! Next step is to write your buildfile. Have fun!

So I just discovered MarsEdit and after using it to write the two previous entries, I’m already in love. Slick interface, handles Markdown, has an excellent and configurable preview window (yay!) and is a steal at only US$30.

I worked off line with MarsEdit when taking the ferry to Gotland earlier today, and well in the cottage I just click “Send to Weblog” and ka-ching, it’s there. Sweet thing.

Go shop, start writing!

GlassFish is a nice J2EE server from Sun, with a pretty Administration interface that makes JBoss blush out of shame. It’s easy to setup but a little tricky to get to autostart using launchd in Mac OS X, which is the preferred way. Here’s a way to get started quickly, but note that you must be administrator of your mac to succeed. (more…)

So you want to make web-savvy PNGs of those nifty icons you just downloaded? With Mac OS 10.5 it’s surprisingly easy. Just select the folder or application with the icon you lust for and hit ⌘C (or select Copy in Finder).

Now open Preview and hit ⌘N (or select New from clipboard), select the size that fits you and save in PNG format. Voilá!

UPDATE: Wicket 1.3.1 is out and the bug is circumvented. So this post is obsoleted.

Finally Wicket 1.3.0 is here. There is a little bug with AjaxEditableLabel in some JREs, but it’s easy to work around.

Copy the source for AjaxEditableLabel in wicket-extensions and add this to it:

{{lang:java}}
@Override
protected void onModelChanging() {
    super.onModelChanging();
}
@Override
protected void onModelChanged() {
    super.onModelChanged();
}

and you should be set. I think there are a bug in certain JREs for anonymous inner classes (which Wicket uses a lot) that prevents an inner class access enclosing class’ inherited protected members.

Well there hasn’t been much happening here for quite a while. Too busy earning money I guess, but now I’m a bit inspired again so hopefully there will be more writings now.My pet project, controlling heating in our summer house, is now in it’s second prototype stadium and I’ll  write about the process of getting 1-wire stuff working on a mac. Not as smooth as I had hoped, but there is a working setup now. Stay tuned.

Wicket has been graduated to a top level Apache project. My very best congratulations! And soon we will have Wicket 1.3 and a smashing new book on Wicket as well, so the future looks just great. I have been off working with my own Wicket projects for a while, but now it’s time get working with Irrigator again, and make my heating controller better adapted for use with mobile phones. I used fancy Ajax stuff for it’s very simple GUI, not realising that the Sony-Ericsson phones doesn’t do Ajax… Silly me. Now where’s my iPhone!?

Have a look at Martijns test of Yahoo Animation vs. animator.js, and tell Martijn what you think.

Do you find WP upgrading tricky? I do. But today I found a wonderful plugin for upgrading and it just works! It updated my WP in just a few seconds. Cool!